Power foods: New diet that might protect your brain

Power Foods for the Brainsuggests that eating a plant-based diet and increasing how much you exercise and sleep might protect you from developing memory problems later in life.

Author and physician Neal Barnard designed and adopted this approach to living after observing what happened to his grandparents and parents. While growing up on a cattle farm in Fargo, N.D., Barnard says, his family consumed a diet high in animal fats: "We ate roast beef, potatoes and corn night after night."

During the last decade of their lives, Barnard visited his older family members in nursing homes "where their hearts were beating but their minds were gone.''

His four food groups are loaded with nutrients and antioxidants that reduce brain shrinkage by eliminating free radicals, which destroy brain cells, he says.

The payoff can be "enormous,'' he says, adding that you can ward off vascular dementia, in which damaged blood vessels can no long carry adequate levels of oxygen to the brain, and stroke, also shown to cause certain kinds of dementia. The book has dozens of recipes that "make it easy to give up meat and fish,'' he says.

Barnard supports his ideas with studies, but be mindful of the kind of studies he examined, says Sanjay Asthana, director of the Alzheimer's disease research center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Most are epidemiological studies based on what people say they eat and on how their health changes over a period of years. The gold standard for research is a randomized controlled trial, in which participants would be put on different diets and their health monitored.

"None of the epidemiology studies are definitive,'' Asthana says. "But there is a general belief that diet and exercise do play a role in the process of the disease. But no, there is no good randomized control study to support the idea about diet. There are good controlled studies to show exercise can help, though."

Even vegetarians and vegans get Alzheimer's, Asthana says.

Researchers have identified a rare gene that causes early onset Alzheimer's. Thought they don't know what causes late-onset Alzheimer's, the most common form of the disease, researchers suspect accumulation of protein deposits in the brain - called amyloid plaques - are the likely culprit. By reducing the amount of plaque, you could theoretically moderate the course of the disease. About 5.2 million Americans 65 and older live with Alzheimer's.

In recent years, researchers have found the biological changes that lead to Alzheimer's start occurring 10 to 15 years before symptoms appear. There is no treatment to reverse Alzheimer's disease. It is the second most-feared illness in the USA, after cancer.